Encyclopedia.com

Encyclopedia.com is an online encyclopedia. It aggregates information, images, and videos from other published dictionaries, encyclopedias, and reference works.

History

The website was launched by Infonautics in March 1998. Infonautics was acquired by Tucows in August 2001.
In August 2002, Patrick Spain bought Encyclopedia.com and its sister website eLibrary from Tucows and incorporated them into a new company called Alacritude, LLC. The business became known as HighBeam Research and was eventually sold to Gale. For a time the website was operated by Chicago-based company Highbeam Research, a subsidiary of reference publisher Gale, which itself is a subsidiary of Cengage.
Enycyclopedia.com saw its traffic decline by more than three quarters from approximately 4 million visits monthly in 2022, to under 1 million in 2025.

Content

Encyclopedia.com allows users to access information on a subject that is derived from multiple encyclopedias and dictionary sources, and it has nearly 200,000 entries and 50,000 topic summaries. It provides a collection of online encyclopedias and entries from various sources, including Oxford University Press, Columbia Encyclopedia, and Gale, its parent company.